Chapter Nine

Alive

Emily's POV

Lucas was very quiet.

Not the kind of quiet that meant he was calm. The kind of quiet that meant he was holding something back with every bit of control he had. His jaw fastened. His silver eyes did not leave mine.

"What do you mean your parents?" he asked quietly. "Emily, your parents died in the fire."

"That is what Aden told me." My voice was barely above a whisper. My hands were on the floor where the paper had fallen and I could not make myself pick them back up. "That is what I was told. That is what everyone was told." I looked up at him. "But I never saw them. I never saw their bodies. I was six years old and I was so frightened and everyone just told me. And I believed it because what else was I supposed to do."

Lucas picked up the paper from the floor. He read it again. His expression did not change but something around his eyes tightened in a way I was learning to recognise as fury held on a very short leash.

"I need to call Adam," he said.

"Wait." I stood up. My legs were not entirely steady but they held. "Before you do anything, I need you to tell me what you have not been telling me. All of it right now."

He looked at me for a long moment. I held his gaze and did not look away. He had silver eyes and I had learned in the past few days that silver eyes missed nothing but they also gave very little away unless the person chose to let them. Right now, Lucas was choosing.

He chose to tell me.

He sat across from me at the table in that stone room and he laid it out simply, in plain words without softening any of it. The destroyed records. The partial witness statement. The silver-haired figure who pulled me from the fire. The blood test results that Yoana had run — the Founding Line marker, the territorial rights, what it all meant for who I actually was. He told me about the rogue wolf group and their connection to a dismantled pack with a historical claim on Ashveil land. He told me that Aden's alliance request had never been genuine, that it was a move designed to draw Ironblood into a controlled situation while Olivia worked in the background.

He told me everything.

And then he stopped and let me sit with it.

I did not cry. I wanted to, but some part of me did, the part that had been carrying sixteen years of weight with nowhere to put it. But something else was happening underneath the grief. Something was straightening inside me, joint by joint, like a spine finding its shape after years of being bent. The lies were monstrous. The scale of what had been done to me was, I could not hold it all at once. I had to take it in pieces.

But underneath the pieces was a single fact that was larger than all the rest.

My parents might be alive.

"The note," I said. "Someone wants me to know they have them. Why? Why tell me at all?"

"Because you are worth more to them as a controlled heir than a dead one," Lucas said. "If your parents are alive and in their hands, they can use them to force you to come forward and make a territorial claim under their direction. You would be their puppet, an heir who does exactly what they want because the alternative is watching your parents suffer."

The coldness of it hit me fully. It was elegant in a brutal way. They had not been able to kill me as a child. So they had spent sixteen years making me so broken and so small that I would never become a threat. And when that failed, when Lucas took me away and started pulling at the threads, they shifted to the next plan. Use my parents as a chain around my neck.

"Where are they?" I asked.

"We do not know yet. Adam is working on it."

"How long has he been working on it?"

"Since last night."

I nodded slowly, and pressed both palms flat to the table and made a decision that felt like stepping off a cliff in the dark, terrifying and completely irreversible.

"I want to help," I said. "I do not want to sit in this room while other people work. I know things about Aden and Olivia — habits, contacts, places. Things that sixteen years of invisible presence teach you that no outside investigation could find." I looked at him steadily. "Use me."

Lucas studied me for a long, quiet moment. The cut on his jaw had fully closed now, leaving only a thin pink line that was already diminishing.

"Alright," he said.

He said it simply. No conditions, no qualifications. He believed I could do it and he was not going to argue me out of it.

That, more than anything else that had happened in the past week, made something in my chest crack open in a way that had nothing to do with fear.

We went upstairs together. Adam was waiting in the study with maps spread across the desk and his phone in his hand. He looked up when we walked in and his expression shifted not from surprise at seeing me, but from something he had just read on his screen.

"I found her," he said. "The witness. The one who wrote the statement about the fire." He set the phone on the table face-up. "She is not hiding. She has been living openly in a town two hours from here for fifteen years." He paused. "And she has been asking about Emily for the last six months."

I looked at the name on Adam's screen.

And the floor tilted under my feet.

After Lucas left the room I sat with everything he had told me and let it fully arrive rather than managing its arrival the way I usually managed large things.

My bloodline, The Founding Line, Territorial rights. Twenty two years of suppression not as punishment for a child's mistake but as a calculated strategy to prevent a specific person from becoming a specific thing.

The scale of it was almost too large to hold, almost. I had spent sixteen years holding things that were too large to hold in a body that was not given enough food or rest or space to adequately contain them. I had some experience with the impossible weight of things.

But this was different from the weight of blame and shame and the daily grind of service. This was the weight of significance. Of being told that the thing inside you that you had been taught was dangerous and wrong and responsible for tragedy was actually something else entirely. Something that other people had recognised as worth suppressing precisely because it was worth protecting.

I was not dangerous. I had never been dangerous. I had been threatening to specific people with specific interests that depended on me not becoming what I was born to be. Those were not the same thing and I sat with the difference for a long time.

My wolf moved as I sat. Steadier than usual. Less like a flicker at the edge of perception and more like a presence choosing to make itself known. She did not have words, she had sensation, warmth, direction, the specific feeling of something that has been compressed for a very long time carefully beginning to expand.

Lena's name on Adam's phone screen. The witness asking about me for six months. Another person who had known what I was and had been carrying the knowledge alone.

I thought about what it must be like to know something important about another person's life and to carry it without the ability to act on it. To watch from a distance while the person you have the information for lives in ignorance of it. The specific helplessness of having something that belongs to someone else and not being able to get it to them.

There was grief in that kind of helplessness too. Not the griever's grief but something adjacent, the grief of the witness who could not intervene.

I stood up, I was done sitting.

"We go to Lena tomorrow," I said when Lucas came back in. "All three of us if Adam can be spared."

"Adam will manage the pack," Lucas said. "It is just us."

Just us. Two people who had met ten days ago and had changed each other's lives so completely that the phrase just us already felt accurate and permanent.

I did not say this out loud. I filed it i

n the place where I kept things that were true and needed time before they could be spoken.